


all the devils are here

by scribblscrabbl



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Good Omens Fusion, Angel!Arthur, Demon!Eames, Gen, Good Omens AU, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-01
Updated: 2015-03-19
Packaged: 2018-03-15 18:03:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 17,571
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3456689
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scribblscrabbl/pseuds/scribblscrabbl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>As it turns out, there aren’t any rules set in stone for this sort of thing—a demon and an angel wandering the breadth of the world side-by-side, calling it an understanding for the sake of calling it <i>something</i>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. the coming

**Author's Note:**

> PLEASE READ THIS FIRST:
> 
> If you've read Good Omens, then you probably know what you're getting yourself into. If not, then I'll give you fair warning that I basically max out my artistic license here and am _very free_ with my interpretation of Biblical figures and events. It's meant to be tongue-in-cheek (although that's being generous; it's really just borderline crack), and not meant to be derisive or taken seriously AT ALL. However, if you think you might find it offensive, you'll probably want to click out of here.

On a dark and stormy night, an angel and a demon settle onto the highest peak to watch the floodwaters churn. (If anyone Above or Below noticed any incongruities, well, they were all busy sorting out the End of this world and the Beginning of a new one, weren’t they.)

The two watch, undisturbed, as the rains lash down with an Almighty vengeance, not so much streaking the sky as enveloping it, plunging everything below into a watery grave. The slate of humanity wiped all but clean. 

The _but_ is, as was promised from on high, an Ark, some cubits wide, some cubits long, some cubits high—the dimensions are hardly relevant at this juncture—a speck from their vantage point, repelling the storm to stay, miraculously, afloat.

“It’s all a bit, well, _dramatic_ , if you ask me.” The demon, who goes by Eames, crosses his arms with the unmistakable air of someone who has no stake in the matter one way or another but rarely passes up the chance to throw in his two cents’ worth. “Not to mention unduly difficult. Building the ship—”

“Ark,” the angel, named Arthur, corrects without missing a beat.

“Building the _Ark_ , rounding up the beasts, locating that one spot of dry land after languishing in cramped quarters for x number of days. Why don’t you just snap your fingers and be done with it? And don’t tell me it’s the principle of the thing.”

“It’s the principle of the thing,” Arthur replies humorlessly. “This must be the path of the righteous, it’s in the Plan. And the Plan is ineffable.”

“Always so cut and dry with you angels, isn’t it.”

This time he’s rewarded with a delicately arched eyebrow.

“You would know. It hasn’t been so long.”

“Ah, now—that’s below the belt, darling.” A Fall, distant occurrence or not, should really be considered off-limits in civil conversation, but he imagines their lot would consider it a luxury his lot can’t afford.

For a long moment they listen to the storm rage and ravage. Their wings, lightly dampened, are raised above them like canopies.

“So. A covenant,” Eames brings up casually, as if it wasn’t a rumor that had trickled down the ranks, and then even further down.

“Yes. No more floods.”

“Well, that’s a relief.”

He realizes some time later that that didn’t mean what he thought it meant.

*

It’s a dark, clear night, with no portents of a storm whatsoever, when Arthur gets a feeling. An inkling. And then a downright shiver down his spine. 

Not a corporeal instinct triggered by a sudden draft through the open windows of his living room or by the cultivated pleasure of sipping a good, strong dark roast. No. It shoots through his heavenly being, like a sharp, thin current through a transistor radio, and makes him thrum with anticipation. An End-Times-Are-Nigh kind of anticipation that he can narrow down to a near-zero margin of error because it’s not the kind of anticipation you feel everyday. It’s the kind you prepare for over the span of a few thousand years.

He sets down his wine and walks to the window, pushing it all the way open and resting his palms against the windowsill, breathing in the smell of the falafel place down the street, the smell of trash littering the streets, and the smell of sweat. The smell of _humanity_.

Then he calls Eames.

“I got a feeling,” he says, getting right to the point. He’s always been short on small talk. He thinks the coming of Armageddon is a good enough reason to dispense with it all together.

“You don’t say,” Eames responds lightly. Black-Eyed Peas start blaring through the earpiece. “Hmm, no, that’s not you at all, darling. Something more classic.”

_I’m hooked on a feeling. High on believin’—_

“Shut that off,” Arthur orders, hardening his tone with not a small amount of divine authority, which Eames could technically ignore but he won’t. “Tell me what you know. I know you know something.” Eames is no Prince of Hell but he’s landed enough commendations over the years, being too clever by half, to get on Evil’s eviler side, which Arthur presumes is mercurial at best, but it certainly says something that Eames is still around, still freely wreaking havoc.

The music cuts off. Eames isn’t breathing, which means he’s distracted to the point of forgetting, and Eames _excels_ at human affectations.

“They’ve set the wheels in motion. I’ve got no clue how quickly they’re turning, but we’ll find out soon enough, won’t we, it’ll be hard to miss. Oceans draining away, satellites falling out of the sky, blood rain, nuclear disasters, all accompanied, I suspect, by the biggest traffic jam in human history,” Eames finishes morosely.

So that’s it. The be-all and end-all of his millennia-long existence, kicked off on a Thursday evening when Antiques Roadshow was just getting good. He feels around inside for a sense of all-consuming purpose, waits for some essential part of him to stand to attention to a call to arms or something. At best he feels nothing. At worst, a niggling doubt. He sits down on the edge of his couch, pressing his fingertips to his forehead. 

“It was bound to happen sooner or later.” 

More precisely, there have been 537 prophets, self-proclaimed and otherwise, who’ve gone on record to issue the exact date of the Apocalypse. These dates range from the year 66 to the year 2280. Except for the smiting and maybe the blood rain, there hasn’t been much historical consensus.

“Frankly, I’d rather hoped it’d be later. We’ve been having a good run of it since the 14th century, you have to admit. Da Vinci’s flying machines, knitting, Columbus sailing the ocean blue, the Internet—”

“We could’ve gotten da Vinci,” Arthur mumbles. It’s still a sore point with him, even if they do have Michelangelo—admittedly with some, strictly virtuous, finagling on Gabriel’s part.

“Of course you could have,” Eames appeases while still oozing self-satisfaction from every demonic pore. “Anyway, my point is, mass pandemonium, beasts rising out of the sea, a War to end all wars, it all sounds grand, but—”

“We’ll win the War. We all know what ultimately happens when Good is pitted against Evil. It’s ineffable.” Angels are never smug. But if they were, on occasion, prone to moral superiority, then this would be a pretty good occasion. 

“Yes, and we also know how bloody dull the next hundred years would be,” Eames says, irritation creeping into his voice, “so _my point is_ —bugger it.”

Then he hangs up.

Arthur stares at his phone for a minute, then turns the TV back on and waits.

Somewhere, probably over London, storm clouds roll in.

*

The long and short of it is: they knew each other from the Beginning, or very close to it. (God’s not big on exact dates and everyone else tries to be accommodating.)

For the first two thousand years they made a point of thwarting each other at every turn, Eames in his flagrantly underhanded way and Arthur trying to maintain every exacting inch of his moral correctness. Over the last four, they’ve come to a tacit understanding, if only because it’s the natural evolution of things when your acquaintance is a millennia-long one, no matter which sides you’re on.

The long of it is necessarily more complicated and, frankly, still something of a mystery. Some might even say it’s ineffable.

*

Eames flies down Fifth Avenue, not so much pushing the speed limit as wiping the asphalt with it facedown. No one notices, and if they do, they tell themselves it’s impossible, because it’s Fifth Avenue and, more generally, it’s _Manhattan_ , where people give new meaning to slow and steady wins the race.

He causes a minor traffic collision at the corner of Madison Square Park and revels for a moment in the barbed accusations being flung around, smiling with all his teeth. This is why he relocated after the Industrial Revolution. The English are too bloody polite. That paired with the stiff upper lip makes his job, needless to say, a boring and entirely unsatisfactory one. Drop a stone into the water there and you get gentle ripples. Drop a stone into the water here and you get a _show_.

He careens through Union Square, leaving the smell of rubber but no skid marks, and finally comes to a screeching halt in front of Arthur’s charming row home. The white diagonal lines indicating a tow-away zone make way for his Harley, and the letters on the street sign kindly bugger off.

“How many laws did you break this time?” Arthur asks when he opens the door. He hasn’t bothered to sound resigned for the last few hundred years, although he still bothers to _ask_. Old habits die hard and all that.

“Not enough to tip any scales in our favor but you never know. Chain reactions can be catastrophic in a city like this.” He grins demonically and makes his way into the sitting room, whereupon he plucks the Merlot off the coffee table. “What strikes your fancy tonight? A Château Lafite? A Penfolds Grange? How about a nice Cheval Blanc.”

Arthur crosses his arms over his chest and proceeds to exude Disapproval of the Highest Angelic Order, Third Sphere, but only until Eames hands him a glass because he’s never been known to pass up a good vintage, honestly procured or not.

“Now,” Eames watches Arthur’s immaculate lines crumple a little when he takes his first sip, one of those certainties on par with the sun’s East-West trajectory and the fall of an empire, “where were we?”

“You had a point.” Arthur looks at him dubiously.

“Yes. That. My point is—my point is—” And then he’s at a loss, not because he can’t find the words, he knows every language that exists and has ceased to exist for Go—Hea—for _somebody’s_ sake. It’s because there are _too many_ words running through his head, too many thoughts clamoring for attention. Demons, on the whole, tend to think simply. Wreak havoc, tempt mortals into sin, and so on and so forth. But when you’ve spent considerably more time with humankind than with your kind, things get complicated, and that, he reckons, no one Above or Below has ever bothered to account for.

He puts down his wine and sets his elbows on his knees. Arthur practices patience and says nothing. It’s one of those virtues he’s been harping on about for close to six thousand years when he knows it’s a bit of a moot point where Eames is concerned. In fact, everything Arthur does he’s more or less done for close to six thousand years with unwavering commitment. A true messenger of God. Which isn’t to say Arthur hasn’t changed, that Arthur hasn’t been _moved_ by all of Earth’s little horrors and delights. It’s just that when you’re talking about angels, change becomes something that comes about laboriously, like whittling away at a mountain with a bloody pickaxe. 

All this thinking leads him to another thought, one about watching a flood and sharing the view, and then—

“My point is, I don’t know if this Apocalypse thing is such a good idea.”

Arthur rolls his eyes. That’s something he never used to do.

“Well, in that case, give me a minute to alert the Authorities and let them know you have misgivings. Maybe they’ll cancel it, just for you.”

“My, my, been practicing our sarcasm in the mirror, have we.” He’s honestly delighted by the temerity, having spent over a millennia coaxing Arthur into being less of a stick-in-the-mud—because what’s the use of immortality if you don’t _live_ a little—but he feels his smile slide off his face like water on oil.

Arthur frowns. “You’re actually worried about this.” 

He sits down next to Eames and spreads his perfectly manicured hands, staring at them mutely for a second, a little, just a little, like he’s not so sure himself about this End Times business, and Eames pounces on the window of opportunity.

“Think about it. The rest of them, they don’t know what they’ll be missing. But we—” And that’s part of the irony, isn’t it. That being in the thick of things, immersed in human triumph and human folly, wading through the moral virtue and moral decay, the entire overgrown mess, really makes you _fond_ of it all.

Arthur peers at him, astonished. “Are you being _sentimental_? Is it even possible for demons to be sentimental?”

Angels, by nature, are prone to condescension. Michael, if Eames’s memory serves him correctly, is the worst of the lot. But Arthur—Arthur’s amassed a wealth of experience dealing with the likes of Caesar, Napoleon, and Stalin. Angels are hardly immune to bad influences; they’re just usually in closer range to the good ones. And distance matters a great deal, Eames would know, because he still maintains that for a while he was only _drifting_ really, until he suddenly Fell, like there was a lower bound just waiting to catch him unawares. That Arthur’s moral compass still points true North after all this time is a testament to how keen he is on toeing the line. Which would really throw a spanner in the works if Eames wasn’t naturally well-versed in twisting circumstances to his advantage.

“We’re full of surprises,” he drawls. “Haven’t you wondered how you weren’t bored of me after the first thousand years?”

“Honestly, it keeps me up nights. It’s why I haven’t slept for the last five,” Arthur deadpans, mouth twitching, and it’s times like this when Eames finds himself wishing he was someone, some _thing_ else entirely. But that’s besides the point.

“My point is, the utter annihilation of Earth and all its inhabitants means there will be no more box seats at the Met, strolls through Central Park, no more Cheval Blanc, dulce de leche ice cream, or tuna tartare, no more wifi or obscenely sleek electronics to outfit your rowhome, no more _rowhome_. And your shop. No more pretending to sell all those Mesolithic antiquities while preparing to smite anyone who dares to touch.”

“I don’t smite,” Arthur argues, feebly, and Eames can sense his resistance, which he suspects was already thin, wearing thinner. Just a few more well-chosen, well-placed words and they’ll be as close to standing on the same side as they’ll ever be.

“Think about those little multi-colored tabs that stick to any surface. And the _suits_ , Arthur. Gone. All of it.”

That makes Arthur down the rest of his wine in one gulp then reach for the bottle, with the kind of enthusiasm Eames hasn’t seen since the Spanish Inquisition.

“I don’t know what you want me to say. It’s not like there’s an EMERGENCY STOP button for the Apocalypse—” Eames considers that one for a second, because if he’s learned anything during his six Earth-bound millennia, it’s that God works in mysterious ways “—don’t give me that look. Even if there was, _which there isn’t_ , I wouldn’t touch it with a ten-foot pole. It’s not my job to question the Plan, the Plan is—”

“Yes, yes,” Eames waves his hand impatiently, sloshing his wine. Arthur grabs it and downs that too. “But how can we know for sure if the Plan is so don’t-make-me-say-it? What if the Plan is for us to question the Plan?”

Arthur gifts him with another condescending stare, this time wrapped tenderly in skepticism.

“It wouldn’t hurt to gently _inquire_ , would it? The destruction of mankind is a tricky business. We both know how well it worked the last time. And by well I mean could not have gone any worse.”

“Maybe that was the Pl— _ugh_ ,” Arthur cuts himself off in eloquent disgust and sticks his hands in his hair, shoulders tight and fingers twitching like he’s tempted to smi—come down on something thunderously with his angelic might. “So if I were to agree with you, which I haven’t yet, how do you propose we _gently inquire_?”

“I thought you’d never ask.” Eames reaches for the Cheval Blanc but the bottle’s already empty; how did Arthur even _do_ that. “You’ve been obsessively tracking all the predicted dates for the Apocalypse as I recall.”

“It’s not obsessive, it’s thorough,” Arthur says flatly.

“And you know how much your thoroughness delights me. So why don’t we just find the one person who made the _right_ prediction and see what else she knows? Or he, or it, or whatever.”

Arthur slides his hands down his neck and stares at Eames like the idea actually isn’t completely over-the-top high-as-a-kite absurd, and Eames thinks he should be video-recording this moment for posterity’s sake.

“There’s a 40% chance that person died one hundred to three thousand years ago.”

“… If that turns out to be the case I’m sure between the two of us we could get a hold of them somehow.”

“Oh. Er. Right,” Arthur says with some embarrassment. “I have the list on my laptop.”

He retrieves his Macbook, latest edition, all the hardware—who says angels can’t be hedonists—and pulls it up with a few efficient strokes.

“You have it in an _Excel spreadsheet_?”

“I keep all my spreadsheet-able affairs in spreadsheets. Okay, here we go, there’s only one entry for this year.”

“You know Microsoft Office is the work of the Devil, right.” Okay, so more like _outsourced_ work. It’s a stroll in the park hacking into the mainframe and mucking up the code after the beta testing. Makes for a nice finger-strengthening exercise every odd year or so.

Arthur staunchly ignores him. “If we’re gonna do this, I need to get dressed.”

Eames rakes his eyes over Arthur’s crisply-pressed Oxford and bespoke wool trousers—in the dead of summer but angels, ironically, are always cold—and makes a point of expelling a long-suffering breath. He supposes it could be worse. They could still be in Paris suffering Rococo with all the bloody lace and buckles.

“You do that. I’ll be outside tempting mortals into heresy and sin. No time like the present, as they say.”


	2. the prophet

Ariadne Delacroix never planned on being a prophet. 

She’d planned on studying architecture in Paris, traveling the world, learning at least two exotic languages, and generally living in blissful ignorance of what the future had in store for her, or the rest of Earth’s 7.125 billion inhabitants for that matter. But that wasn’t in the cards.

Her parents died in a car accident when she was barely one. She was pulled out of the flaming wreck unscathed, perfectly quiet, _gurgling_ even, although she suspects that’s an embellishment; people in a town like Ithaca tend to make mountains out of molehills, if only to pretend they’re not surrounded by so many _trees_. She’d been a week-long sensation. The Ithaca Times hailed it a miracle. The Ithaca Examiner wondered if she wasn’t the Antichrist, risen from the depths of Hell to bring about the End of Times. Ironically, that story is still closer to the truth than any they’ve ever published.

All that had been in the cards. 

The cards her ya-ya passed down the day she died, peacefully with a smile that assured Ariadne everything would be all right. She didn’t know what to do with the cards until she _knew_. And knowledge like that doesn’t come easily; it comes with resentment, anger, denial, and loneliness, sharp as a knife. But it also comes with a little bit of hope.

*

As it turns out, the one who got it right is a 23-year-old architecture major in Ithaca who partially funds her education by running a lucrative Tarot reading business out of her attic. (It would entirely fund her education if God had given her more hours in the day and more tourism in Ithaca.)

Arthur checks his facts three times, once before they leave, once at a truck stop where Eames makes friends with some Hells Angels, and once after he learns that in the 18th century the people of Ithaca used to fondly refer to their town as “Sodom.” He knows his facts aren’t wrong, he’s never _wrong_ , but he wonders if he’s missing something. Or, maybe God just likes kicking his humor up a few notches for special occasions.

“What do you think, wings, glowing eyes, blinding light, all the pomp and circumstance? Do you happen to have rights to a flaming sword?”

They stand on the sidewalk looking up at the neat two-story Victorian dusted on all sides with flourishing hydrangeas.

“So I take it ‘gentle inquiry’ was actually a euphemism for ‘heavy-handed scare tactics,’” Arthur says dryly.

“Darling, you know better than to believe a word I say. Demon, remember? Purveyor of lies and deceit?”

But Arthur isn’t listening. Arthur’s feeling the fault lines underneath the city, certain now that something’s off about this place.

“She’s an innocent girl. Let’s just be ourselves—normal—you know what I mean.”

“Innocent?” Eames frowns. “She could just as likely be one of us.”

“Her house is painted _robin’s egg blue_.”

“And I can look angelic while inciting murder and mayhem. What’s your point?”

They’re still bickering at the bottom of the steps when a petite female in a colorful scarf and Converses opens the door, looking more than a little fed-up.

“Will you two just come in already? You’re causing a god awful racket.”

Arthur stares as she disappears inside. 

He’d decided after running into his 213th prophet, a televangelist who claimed God communicated through toasted Wonder Bread—which, incidentally, made sales of Wonder Bread and toasters shoot through the roof—that if he never saw another prophet it would be too soon. But this one—this one seems to be something else.

“Did we just get told off by a small girl who was _teething_ when the Internet was being invented?” Eames sounds vaguely insulted.

Arthur shrugs then smiles. “Stranger things have happened.”

They walk through the entryway into what looks like a space where tracing paper and architectural implements go to die, with hints of a functional living room poking out from underneath.

“Sorry about the mess. I stress-design when the world is on the brink of destruction,” Ariadne says, clearing off the couch. “Tea? Coffee? I’ve never hosted otherworldly beings before, do you guys consume things?”

“Tea, please,” Eames requests, with a blinding smile that Arthur imagines draws in weaker souls like moths to a flame. “We don’t need to but it’s enjoyable, and it passes the time. Everything’s an acquired taste. Unsurprisingly, you end up acquiring most things after six thousand years. Although I must say the obsession you Americans have with marshmallows I will never understand. Or pumpkin spiced lattes sprinkled with cinnamon and topped off with pistachio foam. Whatever happened to plain bloody coffee?”

“Tea’s fine, thanks,” Arthur interrupts. Times like this are when he suspects Eames doesn’t do nearly as many of the sinister, depraved things he says he does. Or, he would if he weren’t so busy talking people to death. “You were expecting us.”

“I read it in my cards.” Her voice drifts over from the kitchen.

Arthur looks at Eames who raises his eyebrows.

“Stranger things have happened,” Eames murmurs.

“At least it’s not Wonder Bread.” 

He remembers telling Eames the story some weeks after as they sat on his rooftop playing chess around the stroke of midnight with a blaring car alarm as the only reminder they were still on Earth. Eames had said something then about lost souls, lost souls in a mad scrambling search for purpose, with a sharp smile that cut Arthur close to six thousand ways, one for every year they’d spent as formal enemies and then informal friends. A smile not so different from the one Eames is wearing now, his eyes redder and hotter than they were ten seconds ago. 

Arthur looks away, at the Eschers and O’Keeffes on the walls, not thinking about art, but thinking about time. For someone—some being—like him, it makes no difference one way or another. The way he sees it, time is a river he wades in to watch the stones in the stream bed, some worn evenly down by the current and some swept away. It pulls at his ankles but never with any urgency. In fact, urgency is a strictly mortal construct that never ruffles any feathers Above and never comes up in any discussions about eternity (which he also figures is why angels take twice as long to get anything _done_ ). Except—the funny thing is, he feels it now, or at least he thinks he does, taking root in his chest like panic, only duller, without the edge of hysteria.

Ariadne comes back a few minutes later to hand over two mugs of tea before dragging a bucket over from the corner to a free chair and sitting down.

“Leaky roof?” Eames nods at her feet.

“Holy water,” she says, crossing her arms over her chest. They both freeze with their tea halfway to their lips. “I like hedging my bets.”

Catholic priests and Hollywood agree, for the most part, on the kinds of things that effectively ward off demons. Crosses, amulets, drawing pictograms in the air, chanting in Latin, bringing a priest in to draw pictograms in the air and chant in Latin, holy water. Out of that list, only holy water has been proven to work if you fling hard and aim well. Arthur suspects with the amount needed to fill a bucket that big, it would be like pouring hot water on a popsicle, but with less trickle and more ooze. 

“Clever girl,” Eames says evenly, sipping his tea like he has no idea the trouble he’ll cause if he pushes the wrong buttons, though Arthur knows he’s acutely aware of exactly what he’s doing. “We could use someone like you on our side.”

“What he _means_ is,” Arthur interrupts, because Ariadne’s edging closer to her bucket and damage control is, for better or worse, part of his job description, “we just want to ask you a few questions.”

“About the Apocalypse.” She peers at them astutely, like she’s 123 instead of 23. Arthur shudders a little. “Sorry to disappoint but my cards don’t tell me much. Never how, just what and when. Sometimes who. I admit, when it showed me an angel and a demon, I expected you to look more, well, angelic and demonic. Wings, horns, pitchforks, harps.”

Arthur thinks she’s being facetious but he can’t be sure.

“Well, we expected you to be more prophetic. Old guy with a beard tucked into his belt, possibly a member of the clergy.”

“Beardless was a deal breaker for me, frankly,” Eames adds.

“Touché.” She smiles, genuinely this time.

“So,” Arthur fiddles with the string on his tea bag, feeling the not-panic grow, tingling down his legs and crowding up into his throat, “I guess my question, then, is when? Exactly?”

She pauses. There’s three people in the room but only one person breathing. 

“The third of August. 5 pm. Exactly.”

Arthur almost drops his mug.

“Bloody hell.”

“That’s three days away. Shouldn’t all the forces amassing and portents brewing take longer than three days?” It sounded reasonable in his head but actually unbelievably stupid out loud. God created the world in six days after all. Destroying it probably requires significantly less effort. Exactly half the effort apparently.

“Guess not.” Ariadne shrugs.

“You’re taking it rather well,” Eames remarks. Arthur imagines he could’ve tacked on _for a human_ , but demons can, on occasion, be surprisingly diplomatic.

“I’ve had ten years to digest it and live my life as best I can. Everyone dies sooner or later, right? It’ll just be sooner for me, but I’ve come to terms with it. Anyway, there’s nothing anyone can do about—” And there’s that astute peering again. “Is that why you two are here? To try to _do something_ about the Apocalypse?”

“Keep your voice down, love.” Eames glances out the window nervously, like he might catch some spy from Hell lurking. Come to think of it, they probably should’ve considered the possibility three hours ago. Not that he’s ruling out spies from his neck of the woods. It’s just that angels don’t _lurk_. If anyone Up There suspected anything, they would’ve sent Michael down three hours ago to rain on their parade. Not that there’s a parade to rain on.

“Oh my god—” Ariadne starts.

“Language,” Arthur cuts in, frowning.

“Sorry,” she says, not actually sounding sorry. “Why? How? With what?”

“If we had all that figured out, I wouldn’t be sitting here, two scant meters away from being melted down like the Wicked Witch of the West, now would I?” Eames says reasonably.

Arthur throws him a Look. “We haven’t agreed on the doing part yet.”

Ariadne considers them thoughtfully for a minute. “Isn’t there some sort of grand plan you have to follow? Is that why? Is it a free will problem?”

“No, it’s a blind faith problem,” Eames matches Arthur’s Look with one of his own. “We weren’t _taught_ free will, but that doesn’t mean we can’t learn. Arthur was an utter bore the first two thousand years. No imagination whatsoever.”

Arthur arches an eyebrow. “You only say that because I beat you at your own game.”

“I was tragically misled into believing angels were above playing dirty,” Eames glowers a little.

“It’s not playing dirty if there are no rules,” Arthur points out. “And as I recall, _you_ were the one who insisted on keeping score.” 

“Are you two always like this?” Ariadne interrupts, looking back and forth between them.

“Like what?” Arthur asks blankly.

“You know.” She flaps a hand in the air. “Bickering like an old married couple. Wait. Are you two _together_?”

*

They met for the third time in a shimmering field of wheat, field well-tilled and wheat well-sown. It would’ve been a pleasant spot for a meeting, idyllic even, if it weren’t for the dark stain in the center seeping into the soil, marking the treachery of Man. The Demon insisted he had no hand in it. The Angel, who was beside himself with fury, wings spread wide toward the Heavens, well—you couldn’t blame him for not believing a word of it. For all they were Made under the same circumstances, they’d become poles apart, each unreachable and unfathomable to the other, even with both standing over Adam’s son as Death claimed him.

They met for the umpteenth time—by then the number was meaningless—at the edge of a sea War had stained with red. Death was having a field day. It made them both shudder, wanting something strong to wash down the stench of slaughter. No amount of finger snapping would make this mess go away. It was out of their hands, they told each other late that night over something strong—industrial strength—and maybe it always had been. Which made them wonder, silently to themselves, if this whole business of taking sides hadn’t been blown a little out of proportion. 

*

“What do you mean together?” Arthur asks obtusely. 

Eames tries not to roll his eyes. Arthur might be an angel and virtuous and incorruptible, but he wasn’t born yesterday. In fact, he’s all three of those things in theory, but really only one in practice. Eames knows he’s had his slip-ups—another one of those pesky side effects of associating with humanity you don’t think about guarding yourself against until it’s too late—small white lies, working on Sunday, coveting Eames’s Upper West Side view.

“You realize what you’re suggesting is hardly kosher,” he says, instead of _no_ , which is technically the truth, _it’s complicated_ , which isn’t far from the truth, and _yes_ , which is a blatant lie that would likely make Arthur utterly disagreeable for the remainder of their trip.

“Is that a ‘of course not’ or ‘of course not, wink wink’?” Ariadne asks, too slyly for her own good.

Arthur presses his lips together and gives Eames a stony glare for encouraging her.

“This line of questioning is inappropriate and irrelevant to, oh, I don’t know, _everything_ , so let’s get back to why we’re here in the first place,” Arthur says, tone clipped and brooking no argument, even a tiny, soft-spoken one. Eames likes to think he’s been the biggest influence on that particular skill over the years.

Ariadne sighs, clearly of the opinion that Arthur’s being a wet blanket and should consider having a bit of _fun_ before the world meets its untimely end. Although that could just be Eames projecting.

“The cards have already told me everything they can possibly tell me. You don’t think I haven’t tried every trick in the book the last ten years?” She taps her foot impatiently against the bucket, making its contents splash a little over the edge. “Unless—”

Eames sidles a little further down the sofa, bumping his knee against Arthur’s. “Unless?”

“Well, I’ve been making myself the subject all this time, haven’t I? And the last thing I got was that you two would show up on my doorstep.” She folds her legs under her, eyes brightening with an idea. “What if now I’m supposed to do a reading for one of _you_?”

“Huh,” Eames says, which is really all he has at the moment. He had his share of run-ins with cartomancers in their heyday. Nine out of ten would divine untold fame and fortune, and immediately swindle you out of half of that fortune. The tenth always enjoyed telling you about your swift and gruesome death. Needless to say, he’s never put much stock in the trade, but the girl truly seems to be quite something else.

He turns to Arthur who’s—shockingly—frowning, though more in consideration than in displeasure.

“Would that work? Can you divine for the divine? Or,” he glances at Eames, mouth upending into a half-smile, “the occult?”

“Won’t know until we try, will we?” Eames says gamely. “Do me.”

Ariadne flails excitedly into a standing position. “Gimme a sec.”

She disappears for a minute and comes back with a plush drawstring pouch, shaking out the cards and then shuffling them with the dexterity of a Monte Carlo dealer. It makes Eames think dejectedly how, if everything goes according to Plan, he’ll never set foot in another casino (raise and raise the stakes until he has the crowd gasping, and then take the house, leaving everyone none the wiser).

“This looks like a brand new deck,” Arthur remarks, eyebrows raised subtly. Arthur’s eyebrow raising is an art form that pre-dates Classical antiquity. No doubt what inspired all those holier-than-thou Hellenistic sculptures, though Eames never did confirm his suspicions.

“It’s a hundred years old, give or take,” Ariadne shrugs. “They’re practically indestructible.”

“Speaking from experience?” Eames asks.

“What can I say, I had a lot of rage to work through at thirteen.”

She kneels in front of the coffee table opposite them and lays out a diamond-shaped spread of five cards. At the base of the diamond, facing Eames, is The Devil. 

“Ah, that’s about right,” Eames says blandly, and stares. The caricature stares back—with too few faces surrounded by too little carnage—like it knows exactly what he’s doing and he’s got a private room in the Ninth Circle with his name on it, and likely not the fun kind.

“Not exactly what I’d call a revelation,” Arthur remarks, sounding unimpressed.

Ariadne ignores him and frowns, drumming her fingers against the table. 

“I’m not getting any psychic vibrations—kidding, I don’t actually call it that. But yea, zilch. Nada. Guess I’ll have to do it the old-fashioned way.” She taps the top card. “Judgment. I’ll go out on a limb and say we can probably take that literally. Same goes for The Devil. Now, The Fool, hmm.”

“That doesn’t sound very encouraging.”

“Your candid commentary, as always, is much appreciated, thank you, Arthur.”

“Don’t take The Fool at face value. The Fool says you’re on some kind of journey towards something unknown and you’re risking a lot in the process. It’s kind of a wildcard, meaning you’re just as likely to succeed as you are to fail.”

“I see we’re still at the stage of the reading where you tell us things we already know, but in a more wordy, roundabout fashion.” Eames feels his patience wearing thin.

“Well I don’t see you coming up with any bright ideas,” Ariadne is quick to shoot back.

Eames’s eyes flare hot for a second before Arthur’s hand settles down on his knee, warmth seeping through his cotton trousers and wrapping him up in a sense of _calm_. Technically, Arthur shouldn’t be able to do that. Technically, Eames is free from all divine influence. But, as it turns out, there aren’t any rules set in stone for this sort of thing—a demon and an angel wandering the breadth of the world side-by-side, calling it an understanding for the sake of calling it _something_.

“What about the remaining two cards?” Arthur asks.

Ariadne exhales through a corner of her mouth and deflates a little.

“I don’t get it. The reversed Knight of Cups is recklessness and trickery. The Four of Cups means contemplation, meditation,” she says, then chews on her lip, “but it also shows the figure ignoring something obvious, a gift. Okay, something obvious, maybe more literal? We have four cups, a knight on a horse. Four—”

“The four Horsemen?” Eames hazards a guess, metaphorical light bulb flickering.

Ariadne looks up and blinks at him, a little stunned.

“That must be it. That’s perfect, you’re a genius. If we don’t want the world to go _kablooie_ in three days, you two have to stop the four Horsemen.”

Arthur stands up so quickly he nearly whacks Eames in the face with his elbow.

“ _What?_ ”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you're wondering what the hell is going on, feel free to peruse this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Apocalypse. It'll also be helpful for the next chapter.


	3. the horsemen

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Again, this might prevent a whole lot of confusion if you're not familiar with Good Omens/Christian apocalyptic beliefs: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Apocalypse.

She sits on a crumbling terrace blowing smoke into the air, red hair recently cropped short, red dress hugging her thighs, red fingernail wiping a line of condensation off her glass. The streets have been quiet for two days, languishing in an uneasy ceasefire that, people whisper, is just the lull before the storm. She enjoys the lulls, the anticipation that hums through the air like Stukas gathering for a blitzkrieg, though she doesn’t enjoy it quite as much as the mass slaughter.

She took the name Mallorie around the turn of the century but goes by Mal. She thinks it’s more to the point, more _her_.

“A pretty lady like you shouldn’t be in a city like this.”

She turns to the man who spoke, a customer at the adjacent table with a cigar clamped between his teeth and dust settled in the creases of his shirt.

“I’m waiting for a train. Just passing the time with a drink,” she says, although she’s not really on a schedule. She could miss her train. She could sit back and watch it all unfold, close her eyes and listen to the cacophony erupt, horrific and sweet. Humans left to their own devices do just fine. But what can she say, she likes speeding things along.

“Get out of here while you still can. It’ll get ugly real soon.” He puffs on his cigar like it’ll be his last. Smart man.

She smiles, lips stunningly red against pearl white teeth. When she taps her fingernails against her glass, it sounds uncannily like the _pop pop pop_ of a Kalashnikov.

“I’m counting on it.”

*

Arthur’s been involved in enough crazy ideas to know which ones are only crazy until they’re innovative, and which ones are just crazy. He’s been wrong once—twice if he counts the mix-up with the spiral staircase, but he doesn’t because he figures he atoned for it in spades when he gave the Penroses that nudge in the right direction. Which means his success rate is at an impressive 99.9%.

This makes him think he’s qualified to say: “that is the craziest idea I’ve ever heard and it’ll never work.”

Eames pauses. “As much as I enjoy doing the exact opposite of what Arthur says, and even more when he says it can’t be done, I concede there are some logistical issues with what you’re proposing. Sit down, Arthur, you’re making me anxious.”

Eames tugs him back down by his sleeve without warning, sending him sprawling onto the cushions. He’s so distracted by how ridiculous the whole situation is that he can’t be bothered to glare.

“You mean you can’t just wave down War, Famine, Pestilence, and Death and say, ‘hey there, sorry to get you all amped up about being the official harbingers of doom, but the Apocalypse has been canceled until further notice. Have a terrible day!’?” Ariadne says.

Arthur stares. It’s actually disconcerting how serious her sarcasm sounds.

“You know, that might work…” Eames muses. This, Arthur’s confident, is just a predictable attempt at getting a rise out of him. A hobby Eames picked up early, _early_ on, along with painting mythical creatures wearing Arthur’s face and getting Arthur drunk. He claims he’s saved every painting, stored in some warehouse or another along the Mediterranean coast. One had been on display at the National Gallery for a limited time before it was reported stolen. The drinking has only ever ended in embarrassment for one of the two parties involved, and it’s never been Arthur.

He plans on saying something appropriately scathing and discouraging. 

What he actually says is, “We’re not even guaranteed to find them in time,” and then thinks that maybe they should get right to the drinking.

Eames lights up like a kid on Christmas morning. “So you _do_ think it can be done.”

Arthur sighs. Angels aren’t supposed to be spontaneous, they’re not supposed to flout the rules, and their imaginations extend only so far as to help them shepherd the world in the Right direction. And Arthur’s proven himself the best at doing everything the Right way; it’s why the Authorities have indulged his Earthly inclinations for so long, why they struck the Boston Tea Party from his record by 1776. But, as it turns out, an angel doesn’t spend six millennia among free thinkers and, more essentially, free wills without picking up a thing or two.

He looks at Eames, at the face that’s stayed unchanged for so long he barely remembers the ones that came before, and he thinks he really has nothing to lose.

“To think that I would need something to go on. And there’s nothing, no precedent, that much is obvious,” he says. “We’ll have to wing it.”

“Ha,” Ariadne interjects. “Wing it. You guys have wings.” 

Arthur stares at her blankly.

“Well, aren’t you being the daredevil today,” Eames breathes, like he’s _charmed_ by it. And he would be. Arthur’s never met anyone else with so much single-minded reverence for rule-breaking, risk-taking, and improvising.

“Don’t push your luck,” he warns, even as he feels his mouth twitch traitorously.

“I—” Eames starts, and then his cell phone rings. His cell phone, which he makes sure is untraceable, practically non-existent, so it can only mean one thing.

“Ah, I’ll just step outside, shall I?” He fumbles with it nervously and casts one more glance at Arthur before walking out.

“What’s that all about?” Ariadne frowns.

Arthur walks over to the window and pushes the curtains back with two fingers. Eames is pacing the length of the porch, starting and stopping in random spurts, like a caged tiger taught to cower at the sight of a whip. Pavlov’s bell. One of those crazy ideas warped by the terrifying scope of the human mind in ways Arthur never imagined.

“Someone Down There’s checking up on him.”

“That doesn’t sound good. That doesn’t sound good at all. They’re not gonna send up a beast to raze my house to the ground are they? Or bats? I _hate_ bats. And they hate me. It’s a mutual hatred.”

“That’s a myth. There are no bats in Hell,” Arthur says absently, still watching Eames, who’s already hanging up and walking back in.

The front door shuts and he reappears looking a little dazed, like someone was just shouting into his ear with a megaphone, which Arthur suspects isn’t far from the truth.

“I’m not sure if we’ve just been granted a blessing or a curse.”

Arthur runs through his list of worst-case scenarios, more out of habit than necessity. The Apocalypse and subsequent War still top it, which means they’d still be no worse off than they were when they started.

“Will you tell us already? The suspense is killing me,” Ariadne says.

“They’ve given me the job of making the deliveries.”

Arthur’s eyebrows shoot up.

“What.” Ariadne blinks.

“Now? Where are they? You’re expected to do this in less than three days?” Arthur demands.

“In 24 hours, actually.”

“Oh my go—odness, stop talking in your secret code and _explain_ ,” Ariadne flails.

“Well, the Horsemen can’t very well start the Apocalypse without their—” Eames vaguely waves a hand around, “ _implements_ , now can they. And they don’t just carry them around willy-nilly. There’s a proper way of going about it.”

Ariadne stares, failing to find this elucidating. “Implements?”

“A sword, a crown, a pair of scales,” Arthur ticks off. “For Death, it’ll probably be a short, sinister message. Something like, _Go forth and collect_.”

“Okay, so just throw it all into a lake or something. There’s a pretty big one two miles that way,” she jerks her thumb to her left.

Eames turns to Arthur. “Is she being sarcastic?”

“It’s disturbingly hard to tell.” Arthur pinches the area between his eyes. “So how will it work exactly? Do you have to find them one by one?”

“No.” Eames pauses, shifting his weight. He really does enjoy milking the suspense for all it’s worth. “They’re coming here.”

*

Wherever Mal goes Dom is never far behind. 

She orchestrates her symphony, he listens in rapture, until the coda fades and the stillness sets in. Then he sweeps in to admire her handiwork, for all he claims he doesn’t discriminate.

On this particular day they’re sitting side-by-side on a train, sharing a pack of Marlboros. It’s a non-smoking car but no one notices. They’re all too busy running from the violent coup and the mass graves.

“I don’t have a particular destination in mind,” she says. It’s the conversation they always circle back to.

“That suits me just fine,” he answers, tapping out another cigarette. People call them death sticks nowadays. He thinks it has a nice ring to it.

*

“Here? As in _Ithaca_?” Ariadne looks flummoxed.

“Well, that’s—convenient,” Arthur says slowly, perfectly composed. A few thousand years ago Eames would’ve found it utterly mystifying. Now he knows exactly what’s going on in that fastidiously organized head. Arthur doesn’t panic in a precarious situation; he compartmentalizes and deals with it, systematically shuffles and reshuffles the necessary pieces like a Rubik’s until he figures it out. Arthur’s a bloody professional. It’s the one thing, other than his exacting sartorial standards, that’s stayed perfectly unchanged. Which is all just a roundabout way of saying that Eames is strangely comforted by it, that it makes him think if the world ends in three days, so be it. They’ve had a bloody good run. Six thousand years of ushering in mankind’s darkest and brightest ages and sharing the view, so if he’s feeling greedy for six thousand more years, well, that’s just in his nature, isn’t it.

“More precisely, the airport,” he adds. “I reckon most of them are flying in, what with the rash of coups along the Black Sea and the deadly virus that’s got a third of Africa in lockdown.”

“So they don’t actually ride around on gaunt, red-eyed horse specters. How disappointing,” Ariadne says, actually looking put out.

Arthur glances at her with something akin to _fondness_ , and Eames can’t say he doesn’t feel a little bit jealous. It’s the kind of glance that’s taken him hundr—thous—a bloody long time to earn, and the fondness is still mostly outweighed by exasperation.

“If you’re done being a smart-aleck, Eames and I should get going,” Arthur says. “Set our non-existent plan into motion.”

“Okay, then I guess I’ll just sit here and twiddle my thumbs until I hear from you or the world implodes. Actually,” Ariadne bites on her thumbnail, “I don’t want to hear from you if you’re just gonna give me bad news. I’d rather live with the uncertainty until the very end.”

Arthur takes a deep breath like he _needs_ the oxygen. 

“Yea. Yea, of course,” he says, and it’s not so much Ariadne’s implicit plea as it is the frank, wholly unreserved way Arthur despairs over the fate of humankind, of this single human, that makes Eames look away. It does him no good to peer too closely or dwell too deeply when it comes to this sort of thing; the only direction he can ever go is down.

Arthur locates a pen and scribbles something on a scrap of paper.

“My number, just in case.”

Ariadne smiles. “I’ll keep my fingers crossed.”

*

The local hospital is appallingly short on physicians at the outbreak and he has an impeccable resume. Elite education—foreign, extensive experience—combating malaria; the mortality rates were high, but they always are. He goes by Mr. Saito, but most people call him _sir_ and break out in a cold sweat when he smiles.

The first case is in quarantine, the second on its way. If they do this right, it won’t have to spill over the border. They immediately put him to work. He’s fastidious with the blood work, the needles, the skin-on-skin contact, with the first nurse who has a tear in his gloves, and the second who drops the sample on her way to the lab. He has a reputation to uphold after all.

By the time the number of cases hits double digits, he’s well on his way to the next hospital. Job security has been harder to come by since vaccines but he feels optimistic. Viruses are resilient, highly contagious. He’s rarely met one he hasn’t been able to turn into an epidemic.

*

When they walk out to the Harley, there’s a long, thin Fedex parcel propped against it, just big enough for a sword, a crown, a pair of scales, and a message.

Arthur raises an eyebrow. “I was wondering how it’d get here.”

“We have a monopoly on delivery services.” Eames snaps his fingers and the package is suddenly tied to the side of the bike.

“Even the Canadian ones?”

Eames turns to him and blinks. “I always forget about Canada. They’re all too bloody _nice_ anyway.”

He blinks again and the bike roars to life before settling into a smooth, silky purr like it hasn’t seen all of this century and a better part of the last. The body doesn’t have a scratch on it and the wheels look like they haven’t clocked a single mile. Not that the odometer would tell him any differently; it’s never moved from zero. There’s a single bumper sticker stuck to the back. _Hell on wheels_. Arthur can’t bring himself to imagine it wrecked, melted down in whatever all-consuming, fiery end the world is supposed to meet. And, because Eames loves this thing, because Eames is _attached_ , Arthur can’t bring himself to imagine the look on his face when it happens. Which is ridiculous and _stupid_. For them the agony of loss is fleeting. The thing about being immortal is that you outlast everything, so you get over it, move on. But Arthur’s staring at Eames, at the smile tugging at his mouth and the eyes that can be so cleverly, achingly human, and he’s thinking that this must be what people mean when they say it’s easier said than done.

“Out of the lines you use most frequently to annoy me, that one ranks third,” he deadpans.

Those eyes flash red and suddenly Eames has him backed up against the bike, palms against the seat, arms caging him in. He bites his tongue. He’s almost forgotten how _fast_ demons can move.

“If this does end in War and we meet on the metaphorical battlefield, promise me you won’t be merciful.” Eames is still smiling, teeth sharp and gleaming, but Arthur’s learned all his tells by now.

“We don’t—” 

“Promise me,” Eames repeats, ducking his head until his face is out of sight, breath warm against the curve of Arthur’s neck, smelling faintly like sin, bitter and sulfurous, but mostly like _Eames_.

Arthur thinks about grabbing a hold of him somewhere, anywhere. It won’t burn him, it never burns him, not in these bodies. It’s more of a dull, throbbing ache, he’s said, starting from the point of contact and spreading outward, like it’s bent on rooting the Evil out of him. Bloody persistent lot, he’s teased.

Instead, Arthur just lowers his head until he’s not quite touching Eames’s leather-clad shoulder and promises, “Okay.”

*

He sits at the executive table of his new restaurant in Greenwich and peruses the tasting menu. Incomprehensibly exotic. Exactly what he envisioned. It’s what the rich and the marginally famous are into these days. They want their food to baffle them, to astonish them, and to leave them almost as hungry as when they walked in the door. 

Yusuf could’ve been a chef. Instead, he chose to be a chemist, although they’re all just labels, really. Meaningless. They come down to the same basic principles: composition, structure, reaction, change. But he’s learned people have as much of an affinity for labels as they do for exoticism, so he calls his latest creation _molecular gastronomy_. He’s long had the seeds of the idea, settled at the bottom of his pocket, waiting to be sown. The 21st century finally handed him the fertile ground he needed.

The waiter brings him the first course—a tuna tartare in vapor form, enjoyed via inhalation. Calorie-free, nutrient-free. It doesn’t even really smell like food, but the mind is a powerful thing. It believes exactly what it wants to believe. In this case, it believes this culinary experience transcends the body’s basic needs, that hunger is temporary but _genius_ is forever. He really couldn’t agree more.

*

When they look up at the sky again, it’s not the garden-variety shade of pitch black; it’s the doomsday shade of dried blood, with a sickly-looking moon hanging feebly in the corner like it’s about to cough and then abruptly expire. Eames thinks, a little viciously, that ineffability is really just a euphemism for self-indulgent dramatics. _All the world’s a stage_ …

“Looks like the party’s about to start.” He takes a step back, watching Arthur tug the creases out of his suit and readjust his cuffs, eyes cast stubbornly downward. “As much as I champion being fashionably late, I think we’ll want to get to this one on time.”

He swings a leg over the seat, feeling Arthur’s weight settle behind him and then Arthur’s hands on his waist, long fingers curling into the soft leather of his jacket.

“I’m not really on board with your definition of ‘party’,” says Arthur’s disembodied voice.

“You’ll want to hold on tighter than that, darling.” It’s the only warning he gives before he takes them from zero to something considered reckless endangerment anywhere outside of a warzone, though, technically, his speedometer’s still showing zero.

Arthur scrambles for purchase for a second before he gives up and wraps his arms around Eames, hands slipping under his jacket, and it’s that _warmth_ again, seeping from Arthur’s palms through the thin material of his shirt. A functioning speedometer would’ve shown a sudden, alarming uptick in its reading.

They pass a residential area before cutting through the center of town, down a street of neat little shops all in a row, shuttered and dark, waiting in blissful ignorance for a sun that may or may not rise in the morning. At the end of the street Eames makes them take a hairpin turn that would’ve been instantly fatal for two normal people on a normal bike adhering normally to the laws of physics.

“I know we don’t have much of a plan but I think the first logical step would be to get there in one piece!” Arthur yells against the wind.

Eames just smiles. Music starts blaring through the speakers.

_In the day we sweat it out on the streets of a runaway American dream.  
At night we ride through the mansions of glory in suicide machines._

Fundamentalists would call this the Devil’s music (it actually depends on his mood; Eames hears smooth jazz has been making a comeback). Arthur doesn’t seem to mind. He’ll roll his eyes and gripe a little about Eames’s plebeian tastes, but that’s more out of instinct than genuine hostility. In fact, Eames would go so far as to say it’s one of Arthur’s guilty pleasures, along with breaking speed limits on the Harley and yelling at escalating volumes during _Project Runway_.

_We gotta get out while we’re young  
‘Cause tramps like us, baby we were born to run._

Eames thinks maybe that’s what they’d do instead if they had some sense. Spend the next three days on the road going as far as they could, as fast as they could, to watch and hear the world go by them one last time. Not that they’d cover much ground, not nearly enough to do justice to their six thousand years. He thinks about the map he still has hanging in his flat, a 16th century original, remarkably new, riddled with pins and ribbon like it’s the life’s work of a connect-the-dots enthusiast or a serial killer. He’d tracked his movements against Arthur’s, red versus blue, for three centuries before they both ended up in Manhattan. He’s saved it all, not touched a single pin, because, for all he prefers to keep quiet on the subject, he really has become a sentimental bastard.

He eases off the gas as they roll up to the service gate leading to the runway. He cuts the music. There are no lights, no movement, nothing to indicate any supernatural entities prowling about. Mal would definitely be prowling, licking her lips in anticipation and twirling her semi-automatic with the safety off. Dom, though, Dom’s more of a lurker. Part of the job description, Eames imagines. High creepiness factor.

“Ariadne just texted me. She says _check the news_.” Arthur’s thumbs fly across his screen. “Ah. BBC’s reporting that Scandinavia turned into a desert overnight. Sub-Saharan Africa got pummeled by ten feet of snow. Social media is going berserk. The top Twitter trend is World Ending? The second is hashtag _expletive_ those climate change naysayers. The third is Blame China—”

“Yes, all right, I think I’ve got the gist of it.” Eames walks up to the chain-link fence and peers at the stillness. “The Apocalypse upends the natural order of things, not surprising. Sounds fairly harmless so far. No meteors the size of Texas or accidental nuclear explosions. Those are a bit harder to bounce back from.”

“Harmless? Three countries just lost all their fresh water sources. Two-thirds of a continent equipped only for arid and tropical climates is now frozen over,” Arthur says flatly.

Eames turns to look at him. “Then we’ll just have to make our non-existent plan work, won’t we?”

Arthur deflates a little, like he’s reminding himself that Eames gives a damn underneath all the posturing, and, well, he _does_ , if not with compassion then at least with conviction, which he reckons already exceeds expectations. Plus, he was the instigator of this whole saving the world business, if anyone needed reminding.

“I guess we do,” Arthur says simply, with a helpless little smile.

Eames takes a moment to really _look_ at him, and then walks back to the bike until they’re standing face-to-face.

“I reckon we’ll want to look the part. Avenging angels and all that.”

Under normal circumstances Arthur would correct him. This time he just sighs.

“I hate ruining a good shirt,” he says, moving to take off his jacket. 

“Wait.” Eames touches the side of his face to make him still before pushing the wind-blown mess of hair off his forehead and slicking it back with one smooth motion, ignoring the pang of regret in his chest because Arthur looks more intimidating this way, less of a bright-eyed schoolboy that Mal would just love to eat up.

“Thanks,” Arthur murmurs and then looks away, tugging off his jacket and folding it neatly on the seat of the Harley. When he turns back, his eyes are hard and glittering and terrifying. _Magnificent_. “Shall we?”

The sound of fabric ripping slices through the air as their wings unfurl, gleaming with a vengeance.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fun facts according to Google: 
> 
> Mallory means war counselor in German.
> 
> Yusuf means "God increases in piety, power and influence."
> 
> Dominic is derived from Dominicus, meaning "of the Lord."


	4. the plan

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> RIP Terry Pratchett 1948-2015. May your words live on and inspire generations to come.

They wait on the runway to the left of the control tower for half an hour, wings twitching nervously. Every five minutes Arthur checks the news that’s breaking and trending. Flocks of geese terrorizing quiet towns, fish washing up dead on coastlines and making the price of sushi skyrocket, churches having to accommodate an overwhelming number of requests for confession. 

And because he’s getting increasingly agitated, he keeps count of how many cigarettes Eames burns through. Smoking, like drinking and eating only things that fall into the very top of the food pyramid, is an activity Eames makes a point of enjoying in excess because he knows he can escape the consequences. In fact, Arthur’s pretty sure “in excess” is the only principle Eames bothers to follow, which isn’t to say there’s anything remotely principled about it. He imagines it as an umbrella vice, under which all of Eames’s other vices—innumerable by nature—gather and scheme.

Tonight, though, he’s staring at the eighth cigarette dangling from Eames’s mouth and thinking if a plan to stop the Apocalypse that so far only involves “winging it” doesn’t merit a smoke, then nothing will.

“So,” he prefaces, “this is a little anticlimactic.”

Eames waves a hand over his cigarette, making the end flare. Then he passes it to Arthur, as if he hasn’t perfected his uncanny ability to know exactly what Arthur’s thinking, and then getting Arthur to talk about it without talking about it. It’s actually incredibly _considerate_ and sometimes still throws Arthur for a loop, makes him wonder crazily if it’s something about Eames, something him, or something about _them_. Demons aren’t considerate, they don’t do considerate, not when they’re simultaneously lying and cheating and corrupting. It’s too contrary, too _human_. 

But now’s not the time to follow that line of thought. That way madness lies; madness and Eames tend to go hand-in-hand. So Arthur takes a pull on the proffered cigarette, long and deep. 

And then he’s coughing, choking on the smoke and doubling over in agony with his hands on his thighs, regretting everything.

“Huh. You’ve really never had a smoke before. Not in six thousand years.”

“Were you—were you testing a _theory_?” Arthur wheezes in indignation, with just enough control over his faculties to take a hard, well-aimed swipe at Eames with one fanned-out wing.

Eames dances neatly out of the way with one of those grins of his that professes guilt without a modicum of shame. 

“If I’m not mistaken, your lot doesn’t condone acts of violence,” he tsks, bending over to retrieve the cigarette Arthur dropped on the ground when he was trying to not choke to death, in a manner of speaking.

“If they’re used to repel the Forces of Evil, we encourage it,” Arthur glares, straightening.

“Darling, you flatter me,” Eames says, blowing out a cloud of smoke that does nothing to obscure the damnable gleam in his eyes.

Darling. It’s a term he picked up around the 11th century that started out as strictly tongue-in-cheek and then somewhere along the way turned into an actual endearment, a _pet name_ that sounds so intimate rolling off Eames’s tongue it makes Arthur feel, anxiously, like he’s breaking an unspoken rule about—about fraternizing with the Enemy. Which is ridiculous because that ship sailed four thousand years ago, shortly before he stopped thinking about Eames as the enemy all together. The fact of the matter is, he doesn’t share a box at the opera with the enemy, or get thoughtful turn-of-the-century gifts from the enemy, or spend Saturday nights sinking into the couch absently debating the finer points of art history with the enemy and letting him win more often than not. But maybe that’s just it. Maybe the _darling_ makes him anxious because it sounds like they’ve gotten too comfortable with each other, too _attached_.

“It’s not intentional, believe me,” Arthur mutters before they’re interrupted by the sound of an approaching helicopter that makes him look up. “Is that _military_?”

“Mm, Mal’s always had a thing for arriving in style,” Eames says, sounding _appreciative_. That is, until she fires the missile.

*

It takes the length of a blink for the missile to change direction, exploding against the tarmac fifty meters away in spectacular, deadly fashion.

“What just happened.” Eames turns to Arthur. “Did _you_ do that?”

“I didn’t come all this way just to get discorporated,” Arthur says grimly.

Eames really would be delighted at the divine muscle-flexing if he weren’t so busy agreeing with Arthur’s sentiment and being more than a little peeved. Getting sent back to Hell _now_ would be a real bloody inconvenience. It’s not a simple task getting assigned a new body—miles of red tape before he’d even reach the mountain of paperwork. Besides, he’s grown quite fond of this one.

“Well, at least with her you know not to take it personally,” Eames says, watching the helicopter execute a perfect landing.

“That makes almost getting blown to pieces a lot easier to swallow, thanks,” Arthur deadpans.

“A spoonful of sugar I am.”

The engine cuts out. When the blades finally still, out climbs Mal and Dom, followed by Yusuf and Saito.

“Oh, goodie, the gang’s all here.”

“Sorry about the—” Mal waves an elegant hand at the scorch marks, still simmering, on the runway. “I didn’t realize it was the two of you. I tend to shoot first and never ask questions, you understand.”

“Perfectly. No hard feelings,” Eames says, flashing his most charming smile. It won’t do to get on her bad side at a time like this. Calling her a loose cannon would be generous. _Psychotic_ is closer to the mark, though she’d no doubt take it as a compliment.

“I take it you brought our implements?” Yusuf asks, cleaning his glasses with a cloth he pulls from his pocket. Eames has always liked Yusuf. He’s low-key, he’s imaginative, and he has a sense of _humor_ , which is more than Eames can say for the rest of them. Saito can get away with it. He’s a businessman with interests to protect in a declining market so he can hardly be blamed for wearing a long face. But Dom—Dom needs to lighten up. If Eames had his job security, he’d be sipping margaritas on a beach 365 days out of the year.

In sum, Yusuf may be their only hope.

“Yusuf! I hear Earth has been treating you well these days. The New Yorker had a positively glowing review of your new restaurant last week,” he says, laying it on a bit thick but there’s nothing flattery won’t help along in company like this. “It really left me _famished_.” He also knows for a fact that Yusuf enjoys his share of terrible jokes.

“Oh, ta,” Yusuf tips his head, slipping his glasses back on and looking rather pleased. “I’m expanding as we speak. Chicago, LA, London, Paris, all the major cities. They’re all _starving_ for a taste.”

Eames sneaks a glance at Arthur, who looks utterly baffled, and gives a slight shake of his head, advising him to keep quiet and look intimidating. He never could keep the hierarchy straight but he thinks the odds that Arthur outranks them all are favorably high.

“I’d jump at the investment opportunity, I really would, but alas,” he pulls a tragic face, “the world is ending in three days. Shame, all your hard work going up in flames in the blink of an eye.”

“Enough with the small talk, Eames,” Dom cuts in with his permanent scowl, “where’s the delivery?”

Yusuf’s staring at the ground now with a slight frown like he’s sure he was following a clear-cut path, to which all other smaller paths led, but here he finds himself, entirely unexpectedly, at a crossroads, one way leading to reinvented _infamy_ and the other to, well, nothing at all. 

He looks up, glancing critically at his compatriots one-by-one, and then—

*

“It’s close, I can feel it,” Mal takes a deep, drawn-out breath and closes her eyes, lashes fluttering, before opening them again to purr, “Where’s your Harley, Eames? That beloved antique of yours, it can’t be far. Dom, go check the gate.”

Arthur doesn’t like the way this is going. Eames seems to think he can bait Yusuf into defecting, but Mal’s too good at keeping them all in line. A five-star general with a flawless record and even more flawless manicure. But she’s always liked Arthur. For some reason he still can’t fathom, she’s _fond_ of him, and he thinks now would be the time to see how far that gets him.

“Mal, let’s just take a minute to think this through, all right?” Unlike Eames, he doesn’t go around charming people into giving him what he wants. Angels aren’t equipped with charm, they’re equipped with _righteousness_. “You don’t want this.”

“I don’t?” She crosses her arms and runs a red tongue along her teeth, canines glinting like razor blades. But she looks curious, and only halfway to homicidal, so there’s that.

“What do you think you’ll be doing after the world ends? You won’t have any more countries to divide or governments to topple or rebels to arm. You’ll be bored out of your mind. You’ll be _obsolete_.”

He glances at Eames, who’s standing stock still, unblinking, as if he’s standing in a minefield and one wrong move, one breath, could set the whole thing off, blow them sky high.

Mal considers him with a tilt of her head like she’s peering through the scope of a rifle, lining up her shot. She can’t hurt him, not really, but he feels anticipation shoot down his spine all the same, cold and unforgiving.

“You’re wasting your breath, Arthur,” Saito says, looking at his watch with the disinterest of a man who has his priorities in order.

Mal holds up one long finger. “Don’t listen to him, Arthur, go on. I’m captivated.”

“It’s been six thousand years, maybe you feel like it’s gotten a little tedious, battlefields all start looking the same after a while. But they say you don’t know what you have until it’s gone, right? Do you really want to wait to find out? Just think about it and then tell me you won’t miss it. Tell me you won’t miss the noise, the color, the spectacle. The _life_ ,” he finishes, not sure anymore where the words are coming from or who he’s really talking to.

“Found the Harley,” Dom says, appearing out of nowhere. “I believe this is yours.”

He tosses her a sword, _her_ sword—long, ancient, recently sharpened—and she catches it neatly by the blade with one hand, smile spreading like the gash of a freshly inflicted wound. It really doesn’t bode well for their cause. It means she’s no longer Mal or Mallorie, she’s—

“Arthur, lovely Arthur. You make a compelling argument,” she says regretfully, “but I’m afraid we just don’t see eye to eye. And since I can’t have you getting in the way of our holy crusade, I’ll have to kill you now, you understand.”

And that’s that. He should’ve known there was no reasoning with War.

He tenses, wings at the ready, as she tosses the sword into the air and catches it again around the hilt with both hands. 

Then she goes for Eames. _She goes for Eames_. 

Arthur doesn’t hesitate, doesn’t even _think_ , before he summons it, the Flaming Sword, and thrusts it forward just as she brings hers arcing down.

*

Eames stumbles back a few paces to avoid getting singed. 

The sparks that fly when the two swords meet are nothing short of spectacular. For the first time in the modern age, he’s speechless. Well, maybe second; there was the one time with the grenade launcher after he’d goaded Arthur about dreaming a little bigger and Arthur did, if only to prove a point.

War raises her eyebrows, dragging her blade noisily along Arthur’s as she takes a step back, and Eames thinks that if God were to start tearing idly at the fabric of the universe right now, it would sound something like that.

“I didn’t think you had it in you, Angel.”

The flaming bit caught Eames a little off-guard but he shouldn’t be surprised, not when he knows that what Arthur allows himself to do doesn’t even begin to cover what Arthur’s actually capable of doing. In fact, he’s had a taste or two of Arthur playing the avenging angel and, needless to say, he wasn’t disappointed. It’s just—he never thought he’d witness Arthur playing the avenging angel for _him_ , wings arched and eyes flashing like there’s a lightning storm gathering in them, sizzling with enough power for several bouts of righteous smiting. He doesn’t know what to make of it. There’s no point to it, really. Their gamble didn’t pay off and the world lurches sickeningly forward towards its demise. Getting his head lopped off would just make everything that much simpler. He’s rubbish at goodbyes anyway.

“It pays to be understated,” Arthur smiles thinly. 

Then there’s only a split-second pause before she comes at him with the ease of someone who’s used to racking up the body count without breaking a sweat, sword less of a weapon than a lethal appendage. 

And Arthur matches her blow for blow. Arthur looks ethereal and terrifying and bloody _glorious_ , striking and parrying with his blade burning blue at the edges and white down the center, and Eames just stands there like a damsel-in-distress, helplessly enamored. 

Meanwhile Pestilence looks on with faint amusement, crown sat neatly on his head. Famine’s back to staring at the ground, now with his scales balanced on the tip of a finger. Death’s scowl is as close to a smile as Eames has ever seen it, and it’s so disturbing he nearly misses Arthur’s slight stumble, followed by a quick recovery but it’s too late. War catches his arm with the edge of her blade, slicing cleanly through fabric and skin. Blood colors his sleeve and spreads swiftly, like ink tipped onto paper. 

Eames doesn’t think. He makes a gun appear, and then he shoots.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> According to the internet, _darling_ comes from the Old English _dēorling_ , one meaning of which is "household god."
> 
> The flaming sword: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flaming_sword_(mythology).


	5. the revelation

Arthur hears the gunfire before he sees the holes in her chest, neat and uniform, the size of 9mm rounds. There’s no blood, just— _blackness_. That and the acrid, gut-roiling stench of human slaughter.

War glances down, then at Eames, curiously, with a smile playing at the corners of her mouth.

“I didn’t think you had it in you.”

And then all four of them disappear with a quiet but discernible _poof_.

“Well. Fuck,” he says tiredly, because why not. He figures it’ll do about as much damage as flicking a match into a forest fire anyway. A fire he started, if not with glee then at least with escalating commitment.

“I’d say the world must be ending, but that would be redundant.” Eames walks over and gently pries Arthur’s hand off his wound before snapping his fingers. The next instant it’s dressed neatly in bandages with the precise amount of pressure to staunch the flow. The bandages have happy Elmo faces on them. 

“He’s my favorite.” Arthur looks up, feeling a little delirious now and actually wondering if this whole day hasn’t been some bizarre dream. Or a really epic hallucination. He’s always been under the impression that they can’t dream although Eames claims it’s possible if they sleep for long enough, which he sought to prove by napping through the entire 2nd century. In Arthur’s professional opinion, the jury’s still out.

“I know. You told me once when I was getting you thoroughly drunk.”

They’ve both learned he has a tendency to overshare when he’s drunk. He wonders sometimes about the extent of the mortifying things he’s offered up that Eames has stockpiled for opportune moments like this one.

“You mean when I was drinking you under the table,” he corrects, flexing his arm and wincing a little.

Eames smiles brightly with a perfectly contrived streak of innocence. “I’ve never met an angel so fond of pointing out how much more superior he is at imbibing alcohol.”

“And you’ve have drinks with a lot of angels, have you?” Arthur thinks he doesn’t sound jealous at all.

“Only one,” Eames says, smile fading a little, standing so close Arthur can see the Hellfire in his eyes, licking dark and hot, branding him as one of _them_.

He looks down and then realizes he’s still holding the sword. Even if no one’s noticed it missing, they’ll definitely notice its gently used condition once it’s back. It’s been like new for six thousand years, having only been held once.

“I always thought the Angel at the Eastern Gate was the sole proprietor of the Flaming Sword,” Eames muses.

“Well, technically, _He’s_ the sole proprietor. But, in a sense, yes, I am,” Arthur says, simply but meaningfully.

“You are what?” Eames’s eyes narrow, then widen with realization. “Wait. You—I—what—how—”

Arthur holds it up and studies the nicks and scratches with regret.

Eames splutters a little more. “You never told me!”

“There’s nothing to tell,” he shrugs. “They did a little restructuring a week later and replaced me with Uriel. He wasn’t too happy when he found out They retired the sword when I left. If the job had any selling point, it was the sword.” Because, honestly, standing guard at one of the gates of Paradise was like watching paint dry. Watching paint dry knowing that Paradise was right behind you.

“Just when you think you know someone,” Eames says mournfully, and then completely seriously: “you shouldn’t have, you know. Wasn’t worth it.” 

If there’s anything about Eames that’s ever truly unsettled Arthur, then it’s his knack for slipping in and out of character, so quickly and at the same time so cleanly that, in the beginning, Arthur wondered if out of all the versions of him there actually existed an original. By the time he figured that one out, it was an even bigger headache trying to keep track of it all so he could sift through the lies to get to the truth at the bottom—like panning for gold, although he never gave Eames the satisfaction of hearing it in so many words. But now—now he can pick out the truth blindfolded.

“I could say the same to you.” He nods at the gun at Eames’s feet. “You must’ve caused a sizeable disturbance somewhere, pulling something like that out of thin air.”

*

Eames nearly laughs, because for all Arthur’s ability to learn and adapt, he’s still an angel through and through. Eames isn’t worried about disturbances; it’s his _job_ to disturb. If anything, he’d be worried about alerting Them Down There to what he’s been getting up to. But he isn’t worried, and not in the least because none of it will matter in three days’ time. He looks at Arthur’s arm, blood starting to show through the bandages, and Arthur’s ridiculous flaming sword that burns righteously, of course it does, and he frankly couldn’t care less which door in which Circle is waiting for him. He wants these three days, he _needs_ them, and he’s fine with them being just like this, in the middle of nowhere New York on a blown up runway under a sky seething with bad omens.

“We’ll call it even then,” he compromises. “Although my gun could beat your flaming sword any day of the week. Just putting that out there.”

Arthur says nothing. Arthur brings down said sword and chops said gun in half.

“You were saying?”

Eames grins uncontrollably. He never stood a chance, really. 

“I was planning to return that, attempt to right a terrible wrong.”

“Be still, my beating heart,” Arthur mocks lightly but smiles, smiles outright for the first time since this whole disaster started, and all Eames wants to do is press his thumbs over those dimples because they’re a hazard to his sanity, to his entire bloody existence, in fact.

Arthur raises the sword again, staring at it for a second before it disappears.

Then they stand in silence, with Arthur looking off distractedly into the distance and Eames looking at Arthur, at the slight tic above his jaw line, the tired slope of his wings against his back, the stained tourniquet. It’s a sight worthy of its own Sistine Chapel and a hundred elaborate, dramatically staged frescoes. Shame the papacy doesn’t go in for this sort of thing. They’d never want an angel as a tragic hero when they could have him as a victorious one, enthusiastically trampling Satan underfoot.

“This is when you say ‘I told you so’,” Eames quips lightly.

But Arthur doesn’t say it. He doesn’t condescend or make any mention of ineffability. He just withdraws his wings and sits down on the tarmac, a little short on his usual grace, a strand of hair rebelling to fall across his forehead. Then he cranes his neck to look up at Eames.

“You gonna stand there all day?”

Eames sits before snapping his fingers again to change Arthur’s bandages. This time they have little elephants with big floppy ears.

Arthur covers his face with both hands. “I told you about _Dumbo_ , too?”

His voice comes out muffled and it’s utterly adorable. Which isn’t a particularly demonic sentiment but Eames reckons he’s been walking a fine line for some time now; they both have. Only, he can afford to be twice as reckless and half as guilt-ridden. There are a few perks, after all, of having already gone to Hell.

“I’ve hoarded a _treasure trove_ of Arthurian gems, if you were ever in doubt. A fortress full. Fortified by layers of security, of course, to keep the thieves at bay,” Eames assures, leaning back with his palms flat on the ground, legs stretched out. “Sheer cliff faces, surprise avalanches, sharpshooters, an elaborate maze of air ducts.”

Arthur lets his hands fall, eyes dancing. A waltz, or maybe foxtrot. Arthur excels at both, contrary to the popular belief that angels have two left feet. Something Eames learned first-hand when they crashed a masquerade ball in 1393, though, technically, Arthur had been invited and Eames had done the crashing.

“And how long did it take you to think all this through?”

“Oh, long enough. You might say I had a _devil_ of a time,” Eames grins, none too subtly.

“… I walked right into that one, didn’t I.”

“My humor gives you endless thrills, admit it,” he nudges Arthur with an elbow. “You’d be in good company. Mozart, Einstein, Gandhi, Shakespeare. I had Shakespeare in stitches.”

Arthur sighs by way of a concession. “I still can’t believe he wrote you into _Henry IV_.”

_Give the devil his due_. For all the man was a literary genius, he was god awful at cards.

“I can’t either. I’d had enough royal angst and political intrigue to last me a few more centuries. But he gave me the manuscript, I couldn’t very well seem ungrateful.”

“You tried using that manuscript to fix a wobbly table.” Arthur still looks a little haunted by the memory. He’s made it his unofficial job the last three thousand years restoring and preserving priceless artifacts, strictly for posterity’s sake, although Eames suspects he thrills at the thought that if he ever allowed word to get out, he’d have the most coveted private collection in the world.

“That’s why I gave it to you,” Eames smiles. His turn-of-the-17th-century gift, bearing a few creases and scuff marks, but nothing Arthur couldn’t tidy up.

“I regret not donating it all to the Louvre during the Restoration. None of it matters now,” Arthur says after a pause, looking down at his palms. It’s a sobering thought. “I guess time got away from me.”

“Darling,” Eames says, gently appalled, “what would Édith say?”

“She was singing about a beginning, not an end.”

Eames sighs. “Always so cut and dry with you angels, isn’t it.”

That makes Arthur look up, and Eames knows he remembers that conversation. He remembers every conversation attached to every occasion, extraordinary or dull.

“We never change,” Arthur says, a little self-deprecatingly. “We’re reliable that way.”

Except they both know that’s not the truth. Not the whole truth anyway, and certainly not one that would hold up in a court of law under a vigorous cross-examination. The whole truth is, they _can_ change; Arthur’s proved it beyond a reasonable doubt as far as Eames is concerned. For better or for worse, Arthur’s changed. Arthur’s _erred_ , maybe not dramatically, and not in ways that matter in the grand scheme of things, but they matter to Eames. Eames looks at all the shades of Arthur and remembers how they’ve shifted and when, with startling clarity.

And maybe he lets history sweep him away a little, because he doesn’t realize his hand is on Arthur’s face until Arthur says his name.

“What are you doing?” he asks quietly, not looking the least bit alarmed. If anything, he just looks miserable.

“Realizing I’ve got nothing to lose,” Eames answers truthfully.

*

Arthur knows what’s coming. Not in a prophetic end-of-the-world sense, but in a gradually crystallized couldn’t-have-been-any-other-way sense. It’s the catastrophe he can actually prevent from happening, with just a little repositioning, but he doesn’t.

He feels Eames’s thumb brush his cheek and the heavy warmth of Eames’s palm against his jaw. He watches Eames lean in, eyes reddening like a warning light on a nuclear reactor, and then he lets Eames kiss him.

(In six thousand years he’s been kissed twice. Once in gratitude by a woman he saved from being stoned to death. Once by a painter who thought it would fill him with divine inspiration. Both times he’s dismissed as occupational hazards.)

It’s a warm, tentative press of lips, not so much remarkable as it is reassuring, with Eames still cupping Arthur’s face, more reverently than possibly anything he’s ever done, and that—that’s what makes Arthur shake, feeling distinctly like he’s being adored, _worshipped_.

“Arthur,” Eames murmurs against his mouth, voice breaking ever so quietly.

It’s the only warning he gives before he presses in again, insistent this time, _greedy_ , sucking and biting on Arthur’s mouth until Arthur opens it with a groan, one hand grabbing a fistful of Eames’s jacket. Then Eames is sliding his tongue in, hissing like it _hurts_ but still tasting him from corner to crevice, demanding that he give as good as he gets, and he’s no longer being kissed tentatively; he’s being kissed as if the world’s about to end. As if in three days they might be expected to fight a War on opposing sides but, for now, they get to do whatever they damn well please.

So Arthur kisses back, frames Eames’s face with both hands and licks into his mouth, slow and attentive. He doesn’t really know what he’s doing, not by a long shot, but he knows Eames, knows his sound and smell and warmth, and he’s feeling pangs of familiarity that make him imagine he’s kissed Eames, just like this, every day for the last six thousand years.

When he finally pulls away, Eames is holding onto him tight enough to bruise, like the ground might swallow him up and never spit him back out.

“Eames—” Arthur loses his voice for a second, swaying a little because it’s finally hitting him. He knows he should take it all in stride, he knew well in advance how this would play out, but all he can think about is the off-Broadway play they’re supposed to see tomorrow night. The tickets are nonrefundable. “Eames, I—”

He shifts a little closer because he needs Eames to _know_. 

“The place in Chelsea with the donut ice cream sandwiches, we kept meaning to go but we never did. We made a list a few years ago of all the places we keep meaning to go to but never do, remember that? I transferred it to an Excel spreadsheet. And that warehouse by the pier you found for me so I could expand my shop—I decided to lease it, I forgot to tell you. I was planning to sign the papers on Monday. I was planning—”

He loses his voice for a second and squeezes his eyes shut, then feels Eames pressing a thumb against his lips.

“Arthur.” This time Eames doesn’t sound broken up, he sounds—accepting, _content_ , and when Arthur looks, he’s smiling, smiling and making it all seem heartbreakingly simple. “Arthur, Arthur. We’ve had six thousand years. It’s been a good life.”

And that’s the irony, isn’t it. Watching over all these lives on Earth made them think they could have their own.

Arthur makes himself smile back. “When did you start exercising temperance?”

Eames laughs, the sound welling up from some bright, unsullied place, and that’s when Arthur decides that _eternity_ sounds too long and still not long enough for him to move on from this.

“It’s a very, very mad world.”

Which is, of course, when Michael shows up.

*

“Son of a—”

There’s a long awkward pause. Arthur looks horrified, Michael’s frowning, and Eames thinks he might give himself a hernia trying to keep from laughing and laughing until tears stream down his face because this day just keeps getting better.

Which is, of course, when Beelzebub appears, with a loud crackle, no doubt to upstage Michael and steal the award for Best Surprise Entrance, Drama.

“How—quaint,” Eames says weakly.

Of all the demonic royals, Beelzebub is by far the most unsettling with his bulbous, unblinking eyes and twitchy gossamer wings. He also pulls the best poker face Eames has ever seen. Not that they’ve ever played poker together, or that Eames would ever willingly walk into a high-stakes situation involving any prince of Hell. He suspects they’re all dreadfully sore losers.

“Eamezz, long time no zzzsee.” It’s the sound of flies swarming, hundreds of them converging delightedly on rotting flesh. Eames tries not to gag.

“You two have caused a lot of grief for Those Above,” Michael says with his standard-issue robes flowing righteously, wearing a look of deep disapproval. From Eames’s experience, it’s one of three emotional states he cycles through along with “serene” and “blank.”

“And Thozze Below,” Beelzebub adds. The flies begin a choreographed dance.

“Well, the End is still on its merry way, isn’t it?” Eames points out. “Whatever we might’ve done hasn’t made a difference, I think that should count for something.”

The two higher-ups glance at each other—and that more than anything makes him pay attention. Heaven and Hell don’t _glance_ at each other, not if they can help it, because that would mean acknowledging each other’s existence. He always forgets how melodramatic the whole business is, having distanced himself from it for the most part, both spatially and spiritually. Honestly, it’s like the obligatory family reunion where one aunt still gives another the silent treatment for dragging the family name through the mud.

“We’re not here to punish you.” _We_. It’s not just acknowledgement now, it’s _association_.

“If I had it my way we would be,” Beelzebub interrupts sourly. “It’zz not merzzy that’zz kept the firezz of Hell burning for sixzz thouzzand yearzz.”

“You demons have to be so opinionated about everything,” Michael frowns, “it’s no wonder He stopped taking formal complaints.”

“And you angelzz are all shamelezz zzsycophantzz, it makezz me zzsick.”

Eames feels a tension headache setting in. Arthur pushes himself off the ground to stand, composed and dignified as if he hadn’t been licking at Eames’s tonsils just five minutes ago. His tie is still _dimpled_ , no hand-waving or finger-snapping required. It’s all incredibly unfair, Eames decides as he follows suit, brushing grit off his trousers.

“Should I put on some tea and bring out the biscuits? We’ll get a great view of the Apocalypse from here. I can finagle a couch and a few decorative pillows, too,” Arthur deadpans, crossing his arms over his chest.

“I’ll take mine with brandy,” Eames beams at Arthur. “Mostly brandy. Just a splash of tea will do, really. And an afghan if you can manage it. Getting a bit nippy out here.”

“SILENZZE.” 

The air crackles, filling with the smell of smoke and sulfur. Not to be outdone, Michael makes his aura surge with moral superiority, pure white light expanding to the tips of their shoes and then retreating. A neat party trick if you’re into that sort of thing. In Eames’s personal opinion, it lost its novelty after the first thousand years.

“The Apocalypse has been canceled. The world will return to normal in,” Michael pulls a silver pocket watch out of his robes, “five minutes. You’re free to go about your usual business for at least a few more centuries. If you have any inquiries, you’ll have to take them up with the designated Authorities.”

Eames blinks and waits for the punchline. It’s a terribly executed joke; the setup is confusing, the timing’s all wrong, and, frankly, Eames wants to know who actually trusted Michael to pull it off because he wouldn’t recognize a joke if it gave him a lap dance. 

But the punchline doesn’t come. 

Instead, Beelzebub says, “Ezzpect a painful performanzze review at the end of the zzcentury, Eamezz, we won’t let you off zzso eazzily. Now if you’ll exzzcuzze me I have zzsome zzsouls to finish flaying.”

“Wait,” Arthur says, looking as dumbstruck as Eames feels. “Wait, wait, what do you mean it’s _canceled_? How? Why?”

Beelzebub looks at Michael and shrugs, as if to say, _you’re on your own_ , then disappears.

Michael sighs. “As I said, if you have any inquiries—”

“Yea, okay,” Arthur interrupts impatiently, “and then they’ll get lost in the black hole of bureaucracy. You can’t say something like that and just _leave_. It’s the Apocalypse, not a,” he flails a hand in agitation, “a _birthday party_.”

Michael hesitates.

“I’ll cover your economic crises for the next two decades,” Arthur barters, apparently going for broke, or willfully forgetting the ten bleak years of paperwork after the Stock Market Crash of 1929, which Eames may or may not have had a hand in enabling; it’s impossible to keep track of all the cause-and-effects.

“All I know is, there was something about the two of you. Something compelling enough to make Him think humankind deserves a second chance.”

“Third,” Eames corrects faintly, bewildered, relieved, but mostly terrified that it’s all an elaborate ruse and, as a consequence of their meddling, the world will end three days earlier than planned, during which Michael’s face will melt off to reveal Satan underneath, grinning maniacally as he says, _got you_. 

Eames thinks he may need to lie down and take a few yoga breaths.

“Frankly,” Michael continues, disapproval resurfacing, “I don’t see what’s so compelling about an angel and a demon thinking they could be _allies_ , _friends_ , I don’t know which is worse. And—if that isn’t enough—getting so attached to Earth. It goes against everything that’s been written.”

“Maybe all of this was part of the Plan,” Arthur says stubbornly. “The whole point of the Plan is that no one knows what the Plan really is, who are we to say how it is or isn’t supposed to go.”

Michael suddenly looks a little uncertain, and uncomfortably so.

Eames, having gathered his wits, seizes the opportune moment to play devil’s advocate, a pastime he’d ranked in his top three up until the rise of modern technology. 

“Maybe believing there’s a Plan is utter rubbish. Maybe the Plan is a rough outline at best and the rest is just improvisation. Where’s the fun in plotting it all out at the very beginning and then knowing exactly what happens for the next six thousand years? Sounds bloody boring if you ask me.”

Arthur shoots him a look, telling him to tread lightly; Michael’s always been more enthusiastic with his smiting. Their last encounter had landed Eames head first in the Trafalgar Square fountain (much to the indignation of a few ducks that had left St. James’s Park to find some peace and quiet for a change, tired of being inadvertently fed state secrets).

To no one’s surprise, Michael’s disapproval looks close to harnessing the heat of a thousand suns, or spontaneous combustion.

“If I were you Arthur, I’d be careful with the company I keep,” he warns unpleasantly.

Then he disappears. A faint glow about his shape and size lingers for a moment before fading.

*

They stand in silence, waiting, just to be safe. 

Two minutes later the sky begins to clear, almost imperceptibly at first and then picking up pace until the last trace of rusty red recedes below the horizon like dirty water emptying down a storm drain. 

Arthur picks out Orion, the Big Dipper, and Cassiopeia, twinkling undisturbed, before he looks at Eames.

“We did it,” he says faintly, “We saved the world.”

Eames clasps his hands behind his head, still watching the sky, and takes a deep, slow breath. There’s no other sound, no movement for miles, just tarmac and then wide open space, as if they’re the only two beings left on Earth. Frankly, the irony of it is so poetic Arthur gets the distinct feeling they’ve been set up.

“And you thought it was a pipe dream, o ye of little faith.” Eames turns to him, smile so wide and irreverent and _typical_ that he shakes as he closes the distance between them. Tremors that split the hairline cracks in his composure a little wider.

“I’m here, aren’t I?”

In fact, he thinks that about sums up their six thousand years. He could take any cross section of the history of the world and they’d both be there, strange and constant companions by circumstance and then by habit. Wherever he’s gone, Eames has never been far behind, and he’s never really reflected on this certainty, the _dependency_ until now. Now is when he imagines what would’ve made this particular loss so acute, and so enduring, is the loneliness.

“Yes,” Eames breathes, eyes widening a little like a nonbeliever witnessing a miracle.

Then he reaches for Arthur’s tie and wraps it around his hand once before pulling Arthur in and pressing their foreheads together.

“You’re here,” he says, again and again, in one language after another while Arthur closes his eyes and lets the sounds transport him to places he hasn’t seen in centuries and places he thought he’d never see again. Beautiful places, terrifying places, places long dead and buried.

Somewhere along the way Eames trails off and for a second Arthur thinks it’d be fine with him if they just stood here until the sun came up.

“We should probably tell Ariadne,” he murmurs, loath to move.

Then his cell phone dings.

“She’ll figure it out, she’s a clever one,” Eames says, thoroughly unconcerned, but lets go of Arthur so he can check his messages.

_the world is back to normal??? u guys did it?????_

Arthur smiles and types out a quick confirmation. _Yes, Apocalypse averted._

“It’s 2:30 now. With the way you drive, we can make it back to the city in time to avoid most of the morning traffic.”

Eames just stares at him. 

“What?”

“Morning traffic? Your top priority after saving the world is to avoid the morning traffic? We have _centuries_ , Arthur, think of the possibilities!” he says, looking a little pained.

Arthur furrows his eyebrows at Ariadne’s lack of response.

“I’m sorry my proposal isn’t grandiose enough for you,” he says dryly. “Go ahead and enumerate said possibilities.”

His phone finally dings again. When he checks it, it’s a link to a Vine that shows Ariadne rocking out on an air guitar to “Livin’ On A Prayer.”

“Hitchhiking to Antarctica is one. Joining a traveling circus, colonizing any number of uninhabited islands, infiltrating a Satanic sect, reciting the _Aeneid_ in its original Latin—”

Arthur’s pretty sure he’s smiling idiotically now, but he doesn’t really care because Eames is, too, his joy irrepressible, _dazzling_. Then they start laughing, and they keep laughing until tears run down their cheeks, heedless of anyone Above or Below who might be frowning at the incongruity of it all.

*

On the first afternoon of the rest of the world, Manhattan is slightly irritable and damp from the morning’s passing shower, streets deliciously ripe for chaos. An escalating riot, Eames considers. A lawsuit or two at the very least. Although it would have to wait until after he and Arthur cross off the first item on their bucket list, officially termed as of two hours ago.

“I don’t understand how I’m actually supposed to eat this,” Arthur says, eyeing his donut ice cream sandwich with the kind of skepticism that somehow always looks becoming on him. “Maybe I should ask for utensils.”

Eames looks at him, appalled. 

“It’s _finger food_ , Arthur. Would anyone eat fish and chips or a burrito with utensils?”

“I would,” Arthur says, mostly just to be contrary, before picking up his sandwich with trepidation, the ice cream already oozing, holding it as far away from his Hermès tie as possible.

“Wait!” Eames scrambles to take out his mobile. “This moment needs to be recorded and immortalized.”

“No. It does not,” Arthur says firmly, before swooping in to take a bite. When he pulls away, there’s a trail of mocha java chip running down his chin.

Eames stares with a spreading smile, utterly delighted, as Arthur chews and swallows.

“Do I have ice cream on my face?”

“Just—” he leans over and cleans Arthur up with an attentive, lingering swipe of his thumb. “—a little.”

For a moment Arthur just watches him with affection, quiet but utterly unrestrained, before setting down the sugary mess and wiping his hands on a pile of napkins.

“It’s still pretty surreal, us sitting here, when twelve hours ago—”

Twelve hours ago Eames had come to terms with losing this—the life he inadvertently built and then never thought to raze, because the idea that it was his to have was so deeply entrenched it became the truth. The life he built with Arthur, he thinks but would never say out loud; for all his irreverence, there are some things he still considers sacred.

But that was twelve hours ago. Now, he wonders why he hadn’t been more hysterical, more _angry_. Why he didn’t think about pounding on the gates of Heaven and demanding that God reconsider, although he wouldn’t have been above begging.

“A great cosmic game of chess. Isn’t that what they say?” He pokes at his deflating sandwich. “Except it feels like the other side has twice as many pieces. And gets to rewrite the rulebook without telling anyone.”

“You wouldn’t read it anyway,” Arthur points out, smiling, as if he doesn’t feel bitter about any of it. And he wouldn’t. Angels aren’t resentful, they’re infinitely forgiving, and it’s undoubtedly how he’s managed to put up with Eames for so long. Then again, Eames imagines that’s part of their understanding. They each have a job to do; that those jobs are fundamentally and diametrically opposed just can’t be helped, but, every so often, they find a pause where they can sit back without agenda and pretend, with increasing conviction, that it’s possible to leave any conflicts of interest at the door.

“That’s not the point,” Eames says doggedly, infinitely less forgiving than Arthur.

“What is the point?” Arthur’s still smiling as he leans forward, elbows on the table. There’s only one other customer in the shop, ruminating over ice cream flavors, and Eames is tempted to tell him to buy one of each because the world could very well end tomorrow and then his final thought would be one of regret.

“The point is—the point—” and then he’s not so sure there is one.

“That life is short so _carpe diem_?” Arthur suggests, eyes bright, cheeks dimpled, looking positively angelic.

“… You’re giving me flashbacks of Augustus annexing Egypt.”

Arthur snorts lightly. “He wasn’t even half as smug then.”

As Eames recalls, the self-entitlement was divinely accorded, but he doesn’t mention it.

Instead he says, “we’ve come a long way.”

“So we have,” Arthur agrees. “And, if we’re lucky, we’ll still have a long way left to go.”

Then Arthur scoots forward under the small table, pressing a knee against Eames’s thigh and sending a solid, cleansing warmth through his skin down to his bones, then even deeper down, assuring him that some things never change.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to everyone who indulged in this AU with me. <3
> 
> [My Tumblr](http://scribblscrabbl.tumblr.com), if you want to drop by and say hello!


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